Correspondence
by Dala1
Summary: Logan and Rogue exchange letters, sort of. Short'n'sweet. (moved from comicverse page)
1. Correspondence

Disclaimer: No characters in this story belong to me. I'm just playing in my little corner of the Marvel sandbox.  
Author's Note: My muse has been very kind, and I have been writing up a storm: right now I'm working on the sequel to Dreams and an entirely new fic. Those will be up soon.  
  
  
  
The first letter came about two months after he left.  
  
I never got any mail, not even those addressed-to-occupant adds. So when Jean handed me the envelope, plain and without a return address, I was surprised. I had never seen his handwriting, so the bold strokes of my name and the mansion's address didn't strike a memory. And I couldn't think of anyone from my past knowing where I was, or caring.  
  
But when I opened it, I knew exactly who it was from.  
  
  
Marie,  
Hey kid, how's it going?  
  
  
Closing my eyes, I could almost hear Logan's voice saying the words. The rest of the letter went on to talk about his ride north, a waitress he'd flirted with at a truck stop, what the weather was like.  
  
The second letter, sent just a week later, contained a description of what the sunrise over a snow-filled Canadian valley looked like, and his reminiscing about our first meeting. I smiled when I read that he had decided not to stop in and visit our old friend the bartender.  
  
They came haphazardly: three months would go by without a word, and then four letters would arrive in one week. Every time I stopped by to get the mail, I got curious looks, but no one asked who my penpal was. I hid the letters in a box under a loose board in my closet, and never mentioned them to Jubilee or Kitty--his words were for me, and me alone. I read each one several times, the door locked, his dogtags clutched in my hand.  
  
He never marked down an address that I could write to, but at first I figured that maybe he just didn't have a set place to stay yet. If he ever gave me an address, I decided that it would be rude to not have letters to send back. So I wrote to him. I wrote long, detailed letters about my school day and my friends, movies I'd seen, books I'd read, tests I had passed or failed. I wrote to Logan not just when I received one of his letters, but more or less every day, adding onto letters that were short and starting new ones when they were lengthy. I kept it up more faithfully than anyone who's ever written in a diary.  
  
His letters never mentioned what he'd gone back up north to seek. It was strange, but perhaps he hadn't found anything, or perhaps he just wasn't ready to talk about it yet.   
  
Even to me? I was left wondering about this one day, a year after the first letter had come. There were some deeply personal feelings and thoughts in those letters; surely he would have told me about his past! And if he had learned nothing, then why didn't he come home.  
  
The next letter I wrote was four pages, both sides, and it was very angry. I ranted on about how the team needed him and everyone missed him and he was being selfish and stupid, but eventually my hand shook as I started to cry. Why won't you come back to me? I wrote, tears falling onto the paper and making the ink run. Don't you understand how much we need you? How much I need you?  
  
And then with steady fingers I wrote the words, the ones I had only whispered in my darker dreams.  
  
  
I'm in love with you. I want you with me. Please come home.  
  
  
You would probably say that I was a little strange in the head to write to a man as if he were going to read my letters. And in my head, I knew that since I couldn't send them to Logan, it was senseless to keep this up. But my heart believed otherwise, and I continued with my letters, pouring out my feelings fully now, writing down how much I missed him, dreams I'd had about him, what I imagined we would go do if he showed up at my door right now.  
  
I wrote him a letter filled with excitement on the day I graduated and began to really train as an X-Man.  
  
I wrote him a very long letter after the incident with Ms. Marvel. Part of it was wonder in my newfound powers, part was fear of yet another personality inside my skin, and part was guilt over taking a life.  
  
I wrote a mostly happy letter about Jean and Scott's wedding; mostly happy because it was such a wonderful and beautiful day, but partly sad because I knew his feelings about her.  
  
I documented all of our missions, our new teammates . . . I even tentatively described my attraction to Remy. But if you were here, I wrote wistfully, the Cajun wouldn't have a chance.  
  
I wrote about life, death, love, pain, sadness, happiness . . . my letters to Logan became my outlet, my source of strength in which I could tell him things I couldn't even mention to anyone else.  
  
All this was well and good, but the last letter I'd received from him said simply, I'm coming home. It was four and a half years after he'd left, and he was finally returning.  
  
Ecstatic, but apprehensive, I felt it was my duty to tell the Professor, but he already knew. A room was ready, in fact, and so I did the hardest thing in all the time I'd known him. I wrote a final letter, saying that I still loved him but if he didn't feel the same, I could live with it. I signed it Marie, as I always did. Then I took that letter and the others, which had accumulated into a remarkably large bundle, and I put them on his bed, along with the tags.  
  
Then I holed up in my room, only leaving to grab something to eat. When I left on the second day of my self-imposed quarantine, I came back to find a single envelope on my pillow containing something heavier than paper.  
  
I opened it and took out a very short letter.  
  
  
I read them all, and I only have two things to say. These are yours, and so I am. Come over here now because I've been a fool and taken too damn long to come home to you.  
--Logan   
  
  
I pulled the dogtags out of the envelope, finding a new one on the chain. It said Rogue on one side and 'my Marie' on the other.  
  
Smiling, I put them around my neck and went to him. Letters were great and all, but now that I had the real Logan back, I didn't think we'd be writing anything for awhile.   
  
  



	2. You Can Go Home Again

Disclaimer: All the characters in this story belong to Marvel. So not mine=don't sue.  
This is the sequel to my fic "Correspondence;" you might want to read that one first, it'll make more sense.  
  
  
  
I really don't know what possessed me to write the first letter.  
  
I had checked into a hotel just across the Canadian border; though I could have made it to Alkali Lake by morning, I felt such a strong pull back to Xavier's mansion that I had to stop. It was almost a physical sensation, a tug and a pain in my heart, the farther I got from Westchester County. From her.  
  
It was a cheap little place, old and run-down, but the sheets were clean. I was too restless to sleep, so I opened the drawer on the nightstand and looked inside.   
  
I noticed the stationary, envelopes and stamps first. The paper contained the name of the hotel, which I carefully scribbled over, but luckily there was no return address on the envelope. I wouldn't be here long enough for her to post a reply, but even if I was, I knew that if I had something of hers in my possession, that if I could smell her scent on the paper and look at her careful script, I would immediately turn tail and go back home. Back to Rogue, to my girl, my Marie.   
  
So I wrote a short, quick letter that wasn't much on the surface. But it felt good to get something down, something that she could read, and it was much safer than calling her. Her voice, I would never be able to rest.  
  
And when I had sent that letter, I stayed for three days in the little hotel. Can't explain why I dreaded continuing on my journey; maybe instinctively I knew that it was pointless to chase the past. Even if I found something, what good would it do? I couldn't go back and stop the people who had given me this adamantium and in return stolen my memories . . . and I wasn't sure I wanted to. Had that never happened, I would have never known her.  
  
It was nearly a month before I reached the lake, because I took my time about it. Most of the day I'd spend riding the motorcycle, but in great loops around the backroads of a small town. I couldn't move backward, and I didn't want to move forward, so I made myself stationary.  
  
Eventually I found the abandoned complex, and spent another two months staying with an elderly lady while combing the area. It came back to me slowly, in pieces: I remembered seeing this stream, or that tree stump, but all the memories were from the days I had spent in half-wild terror after the procedure. The military ground had been wiped absolutely clean, as clean as my head, and I was filled with rage. Several times I started a letter to her about these feelings, how it burned me inside to see things I only half remembered. But inevitably I would shred it before it was finished, and burn the scraps. Such things could only be said in person, in the dark, when she wouldn't be able to see the tears in my eyes.  
  
It would have made every kind of sense in the world to return to Xavier's mansion once I discovered that there were no answers. But I've never been a terribly sensible person, and I was plagued by doubts. She was a young girl; they formed crushes that lasted for a few weeks and then moved onto someone else. I had no way of knowing that she was all the while missing me, pining after me, writing letters of her own that she couldn't send.  
  
Truth be told, I was afraid. Afraid of these feelings, which were so new and alien, and afraid that if I returned, I wouldn't find her the same as when I had left.  
  
So nearly four years passed, and for me they were a blur. I worked most of the time, usually manual labor or garage work, but I never stayed in one place for more than a few months. I even considered going back into the cages again, but then decided that it was not something I would tolerate anymore. It seemed trivial, to fight for money when I had recently fought for ideals and the safety of the world.  
  
A person would probably think I met women, if not the relationship kind, then the pay-for-favors kind. And I thought about it, sometimes, but in the end I imagined myself looking her in the eyes and telling her the things I had done up north. Prostitutes and floozies were not something I could envision myself bringing up, and so I lived like a damned monk.  
  
There wasn't a big change in my life that triggered my decision to return home; I merely woke up one morning and thought, Enough is enough. So I wrote her a quick note and posted it, sent another to the Professor, hopped on my bike and started home.  
  
The journey back was naturally much shorter than my initial ride. Despite the fact that I still had fears and reservations about her feelings toward me, I was just going to have to be a man and face it. If she didn't want me, so be it. I'd once promised the kid that I'd take care of her, and it was high time I started to live up to that vow.  
  
Because of this, reading her letters was especially hard. Every sadness, every pain in the past four years of her life struck me with a sharpness and a depth. So much had happened that I wasn't there to protect her from, and the guilt and shame threatened to send me away again.  
  
It was the love she spoke of, the dreams I'd starred in, the terrible ache she described that was life without me, which kept me there. It was having my hopes reassured that yes, she did love me and she did want me and everything was going to be okay, that made me write her a letter back. It was very straightforward. I was too filled with emotions I couldn't describe to put any kind of romantic finesse into it (although I would have to be sure to outdo that Cajun, and made sure the boy's first sight of me was with her under my arm).  
  
Sneaking into her room, I fought the urge to curl up in the bed that held her smell. I left her the letter and the tags, along with the extra one I'd had made for her, and returned to my own room.   
  
She was there within minutes, my Marie, and we got about the serious business of making up for the last four years.  
  



End file.
